Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Dragon Ball Z

With the ending of Dragon Ball, Toei Animation quickly released a sequel series, Dragon Ball Z (ドラゴンボールZ(ぜっと), Doragon Bōru Zetto?, commonly abbreviated DBZ). Picking up where the first left off, Dragon Ball Z is adapted from the final twenty-six volumes of the manga series. It premiered in Japan on Fuji Television on April 26, 1989, taking over its predecessor's time slot, and ran for 291 episodes until its conclusion on January 31, 1996.[17]Following its licensing of Dragon Ball, Funimation Entertainment licensed Dragon Ball Z for an English language release in North America. For Dragon Ball Z, Ocean Group was contracted to produce an English dub track. The dubbed episodes premiered in the United States on WB in September 1996. In May 1998, the broadcast was canceled and Funimation stopped production of the dubbed episodes. Three months later, the series began airing on Cartoon Network as part of the channel's new Toonami programming block. In 1999, Funimation started dubbing the series again, now using their own in-house voice actors and with a new musical score. The series completed its run in April 2003. Later that year, Funimation redubbed the first 67 episodes of the series, restoring the removed content and replacing the Ocean Group dubbing with the same voice cast used in the later episodes. These redubbed episodes were released to Region 1DVD in uncut box sets, starting in April 2005, and aired on Cartoon Network throughout the summer of the same year. The Funimation dubbed episodes also aired in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Republic of Ireland.In the United Kingdom, the Funimation dubs of episodes 168 through the final episode were replaced with a new dubbed version. This version used a dub language track produced by Blue Water studios, but continued using most of Funimation's English language scripts.